The Big Picture
“It’s an honor to be nominated,” as they say, and that’s certainly true when it comes to the Academy Awards. This ceremony holds such prestige in the world of film that to just be invited is an honor. Still, it can be quite fascinating to watch the Oscars constantly nominate certain artists but never deem them worthy of an Oscar win. This provides complications to the whole “nominations are an honor” thing, since it makes big actors and directors wonder why they’re worthy of constant nominations but never a win. Glenn Close is a famous example of this with her eight Oscar nominations that have never resulted in a win, while Kenneth Branagh secured eight Oscar nominations across a slew of different categories (Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Live-Action Short) before he finally won one for his Belfast screenplay. Yet these treasured artists don’t hold a candle to the director who’s received the most Best Directing Oscar nominations without winning a single award – Clarence Brown.
Then there are the directors, the folks who help steer massive cinematic ships into the port that is movie theaters across the world. Many directors have secured several nominations over the years without ever getting a win. Folks like Quentin Tarantino and Ridley Scott, for instance, each got three Best Director nods but never took home a Best Director Oscar. However, in the field of oft-nominated filmmakers at the Oscars who never got a win, there is one who towers over all others. This very specific honor belongs to none other than vintage filmmaker Clarence Brown, a director who may not be a household name today but whose lack of wins at the Oscars has made him a go-to figure in award-season trivia games everywhere.
Who Is Clarence Brown?
Clarence Brown’s first directorial effort was in 1915 with Trilby. From there, this director became an annual fixture of theatrical cinema, with the filmmaker becoming especially well-known for his collaborations with performers like Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo. At just the third Academy Awards in history, Clarence Brown managed the impressive feat of scoring two Best Director nominations at one ceremony, one for Anna Christie, the other for Romance. Neither film was also nominated in the Best Picture category (we’ll return to that factoid later), but his rampant presence in the Best Director category this year was a clear signal that the Academy Awards had a fondness for Clarence Brown.
The following year, Brown would score another Best Director nod for A Free Soul. After this feature, Brown wouldn’t get another Best Director nomination at the Oscars for an entire decade, though he’d make a big comeback to the ceremony in the 1940s. Beginning with the 1943 feature The Human Comedy, Brown secured a total of three Best Director Oscar nods across the 40s, with the other two nominations going towards National Velvet and The Yearling. With this, Clarence Brown brought his Best Director nominations up to a staggering number of six by the time the 19th Academy Awards rolled around. By the time Brown got his final nomination for The Yearling, his number of Best Director nominations even outstripped William Wyler, who had five nods at the time.
Wyler would eventually secure 12 Best Director nominations, the most ever for a single filmmaker, but the fact that Brown briefly surpassed him suggests just how adored this director was in the film industry. A few years after his final Best Director nomination in 1953, Brown retired. Though he would survive until 1987 to the age of 97, Brown never helmed another movie. However, even though his filmography concluded in the early 1950s, Brown’s legacy as a filmmaker stretches far beyond the world of award-season trivia. Still, for the sake of this piece, it’s now pertinent to ask…why didn’t Clarence Brown ever get to translate one of his six Oscar nominations into a win?
Why Clarence Brown Never Won a Best Director Oscar
One key problem for Clarence Brown’s movies is that many of them got Best Director nominations but not a slew of other awards. In fact, among his features that received Best Director nods, only two of them (The Human Comedy and The Yearling) also secured Best Picture nominations. Only two movies in history have ever won the Best Director Oscar without a Best Picture nomination (Two Arabian Knights and The Divine Lady) and both instances occurred within the first two Oscars ceremonies. The Academy regularly nominates movies for Best Director that also don’t get Best Picture nominations, as seen by modern titles like Another Round and Cold War. However, it’s incredibly rare for such titles to also win Best Director, putting four of Clarence Brown’s Best Director-nominated movies at an incredibly statistical disadvantage.
The frequent lack of Best Picture nominations or tons of other Oscar nods for Clarence Brown’s movies also suggested that there may not have been enough overall passion for features like Anna Christie or Romance to get them to a Best Director victory. While films with minimal amounts of overall nominations can score Best Director wins, it helps to have a multitude of nominations across a variety of departments (from below-the-line workers to actors to screenwriting) to ensure there’s a lot of passion for your motion picture. If Best Director is just one of two nominations for your film or even just the only nod, then it really is a victory unto itself. So was the fate of many Clarence Brown titles.
Even the Clarence Brown directorial efforts that did manage to secure Best Picture nods and other high-profile nominations beyond Best Director, though, had the misfortune of competing for Oscars in years dominated by iconic award season juggernauts. For instance, The Human Comedy was nominated for a bevy of Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor (plus Best Director, of course). Its competition that year? Casablanca, which beat The Human Comedy out in the Best Picture and Best Director category. Meanwhile, The Yearling had the misfortune of debuting in 1946, the same year The Best Years of Our Lives swept the Oscars with its incredibly relevant story about World War II veterans coming back to America and trying to carve out lives for themselves. Brown’s films tended to get overwhelmed by other bigger movies. Unfortunately, timing even plagued his first two Best Director nominations, which happened in the same year and likely split the votes of some Academy members.
Of course, the other big thing to keep in mind when it comes to the Best Director Oscar is that many iconic filmmakers either never win it or only win it once. Trying to figure out what filmmakers will or won’t resonate with Oscar voters has been a fool’s errand since the start of this ceremony. Most notably, Stanley Kubrick never won a Best Director Oscar for any of his incredible works that are still leaving an enormous impact on people. Orson Welles, Spike Lee, Lynne Ramsay, and Julie Dash all have zero Best Director Oscars while Tom Hooper, Michel Hazanavicius, and Roman Polanski each have a Best Director statue. Clarence Brown never got an Oscar win across six nominations, but he’s in good company when it comes to iconic filmmakers who never scored a victory in this category.
Maybe Clarence Brown Didn’t Need an Oscar
Clarence Brown was never able to translate those six Best Director Oscar nominations into wins but there’s no shame in such a feat. After all, that massive number of nominations still puts him ahead of the lifetime Best Director nominations for iconic filmmakers like George Stevens, King Vidor, and Francis Ford Coppola. Plus, the historic precedent for so many beloved directors never securing a Best Director Oscar in their respective lifetimes dilutes any supposed “shame” associated with this trivia. Who would be embarrassed about joining the likes of Kubrick or Hitchcock in a category of under-awarded master directors?
If anything, Clarence Brown’s lack of Best Director wins in his career is less of an indictment of this filmmaker’s artistic chops and more of a reflection of just how prickly scoring Oscar wins can be. Like the quality of any movie, the inevitable outcome of the average Academy Awards ceremony is a crapshoot. Pure chance in the form of certain movies opening the same year as Casablanca or not also getting a simultaneous Best Picture nomination can clip a movie’s Oscar chances. Often, a movie’s quality or the talents of the filmmaker bringing that feature to life are irrelevant. Larger forces and the chaotic whims of voters are always at play in the deeply human Oscars. If you want an illustration of just how bonkers this ceremony can be, just look at all the disparate qualities that coalesced to ensure Clarence Brown would never get a Best Director Oscar.
If there’s any positive upside to Clarence Brown forever being a part of Oscars trivia, it’s that his award season troubles can possibly increase the notoriety of his directorial efforts. This director is not only not a household name in the modern era but also absent from the lips of even die-hard film geeks. Classic features like The Yearling and Anna Christie just aren’t referenced much in modern pop culture compared to other movies from the same era like The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca. However, if people are still talking about Clarence Brown’s Academy Awards exploits in the modern world, maybe they’ll also be inclined to watch and talk about the various films he got Best Director nods for. In other words, losing out on those Oscars might end up helping Clarence Brown’s works endure long into the future.
